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Internet Plagiarism:
As more students use the Internet for research, the temptation to plagiarize has greatly increased. Students can refer to any search engine, type in the keywords associated with a topic, and in a matter of seconds, retrieve a number of web sites that offer full text information ready to be copied. Sites such as Researchpaper.com and Term papers-on-file offer an open forum for academic misconduct. Instructors who are confronted with Internet plagiarism often face the burden of trying to locate the evidence as proof that cheating has occurred. Unlike most traditional information resources, the Internet is difficult to search. URLs change daily, information is updated and revised, and some sites disappear altogether. For this reason, strategies must be developed to deter this new form of academic misconduct.
Before we teach our students about plagiarism, it is important to ask the following questions: Is there a written policy distributed to students on academic misconduct? Do students have a clear understanding of what constitutes academic misconduct? What are the procedures by which incidents of plagiarism are handled? Are students permitted to revise their work or are they expelled? Even though most universities have established policies to respond to plagiarism, some instructors do not take time to review this material with their students. Many do not even practice consistency in enforcing these policies. And finally, in most cases, teaching students about plagiarism becomes the sole responsibility of the English Department.
Since plagiarism can occur in any classroom, it is pertinent that all instructors review the existing policy on plagiarism at the beginning of each new term, even if the course they teach is not writing intensive. University policy should first define plagiarism and then offer an explanation on the types of offenses that can be considered forms of academic misconduct. This policy should also include examples of plagiarism paralleled with the corrected forms of citation and a description of the procedures toward resolving incidents of misconduct. Rebecca Moore Howard proposes a model policy in which she includes the following explanation of plagiarism: An important requirement of most academic writing is acknowledging one's sources. We all work from sources, even when we are being creative. American academic culture demands that writers who use the exact words of a source supply quotation marks at the beginning and end of the quotation, so that the reader can know where the voice of the source begins and ends. In addition, the writer must use footnotes, parenthetical notes, or endnotes to cite the source, so that the reader can consult that source if he or she chooses. Writers must acknowledge the sources not only of words, but also of ideas, insofar as is possible, even when they are not quoting word for word. Moreover, in final-draft writing, academic writers may not paraphrase a source by using its phrases or sentences, with a few changes in grammar or word choice--even when the source is cited begins and ends. (799) Other examples of plagiarism policies can be found on the Internet. Most university web pages include sections that outline the school's response to academic misconduct. In addition, sites such as Plagiarism on the Internet, the Instructor's Guide to Plagiarism on The Internet, the University of Michigan's Library's Plagiarism page offer sample lessons and articles on plagiarism for instructors to use in their classes. All of these sites provide suggestions on how to identify Internet plagiarism and list links for term paper files.
After establishing a clear understanding of university policy on plagiarism, instructors should review the Internet to investigate the scope of material on the topics they will assign students to research. Instructors who take time to review this material will be more inclined to identify information that has been plagiarized. In addition, we need to teach our students how to evaluate web sites more critically. All too often, the material we believe students have misquoted is actually presented on the web page as the original source. Furthermore, most web pages do not contain citation information we use in traditional sources. Web documents have no page numbers, and in many cases list no author or publication date. Often the content of a web page may be entirely transcribed from another source without proper citation. One quick review of the Internet demonstrates evidence of several examples of this practice. As a result, students may innocently misquote information because they did not know the content on the web page was plagiarized. Most students who are beginning researchers simply do not possess the background or knowledge of primary references to make critical assessments of information. Hence, it is our duty to determine the level of our students' research skills before expecting them to assess the validity of other
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